[FRIAM] Double Master Function (was Re: bad covid story)

[Steve Smith]

Well stated if (and!) densely packed.

Your conception of F vs SF and invocation of Deutsch's "hard to vary" 
are the sorts of ideas I was trying to get to with the idea of emergent 
coherence vs literal consistency.

I like the idea of broad coverage without giving up coherence... "if 
everything is possible, then nothing is interesting"?   I was part of an 
early internet fiction writing group hosted by Orson Scott Card back in 
the 90s (Hatrack River) which meant that in exchange for having lots of 
possible first-readers of my own work, I was blessed/burdened with 
reading a lot of amateur fiction. The biggest flaw *I* encountered in 
the heavily-weighted-toward-fantasy milieu of submissions was this 
one... it felt like these inexperienced writers simply enjoyed (and 
abused) the license to "coin a new bit of magic" anytime their 
protaganist got cornered...  that was not very interesting (to me).   On 
the other hand, I might be too biased toward always trying to "figure 
out the hidden logics" which makes (for me) a good fantastical tale.   
I'm not big on murder-mysteries, but that is what seems to carry them to 
the extent they are carried for me... the sense that no matter how 
tangled the evidence may be, I know/trust that the author (or more to 
the point, the story itself) has a hidden logic which will be revealed 
and it is up to me to tease it out as best I can.  If it is too easy, it 
isn't interesting, if it is too hard, it isn't interesting...  the best 
ones usually have me untangling any number of the tangles but having at 
least a few left obscured to me such that I learn something (about 
getting away with murder?  human nature?) as a consequence.   I may well 
still be looking (too much) for (too much) consistency by your measure.

A departure from the Gouldian binary pitting F vs SF might be David 
Brin's "Practice Effect 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect>" where "everything 
is possible, but you still have to put in the work!".   Zelazny's 
"Hellriding" felt to be his version of "putting in the work".   When I 
first read Brin's book I was a little put off in the way I implied above 
but I was impressed by what I called Zelazny's work of "Hard 
Fantasy".    Probably another word for "hidden logics".

Speaking of consistency and the adjacent possible.   Your talk of "cone 
of possibilities" reminds me of HashLife (Gosper 
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0167278984902513>) 
and the value of memoization.   I never followed through on a project 
with Susan Stepney and one of her Grad students to try to use 
memoization efficiency as a rough measure of entropy and therefore 
"interestingness" in hashlife...   One of the unexplored hypotheses I 
held was that there were likely finer structure in Class IV (Wolfram 
<https://content.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/34/2020/07/universality-complexity-cellular-automata.pdf>) 
CA which could be found by mining the metadata from memoization and 
back-propogating of complex end-states.  I think Kauffman's Boolean Node 
Automata 
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0167278984902574>(from 
whence ultimately came his "adjacent possible"?) were a bit more apt in 
not imposing the a-priori structure that CA do.

On 2/4/22 8:59 AM, glen wrote:
> Exactly. While I maintain hope that EricS will not think my question 
> about CliFi and the possibility of progressive life without freezing 
> out prior forms is simply the affections of a hopelessly ignorant, 
> albeit hopefully lovable dog, I can't help but reject the idea that 
> it's anthropocentric. And you're spot on in calling back to the 
> hegemony of *consistency* in such conversations. I think that hegemony 
> is inappropriate. Completeness is the more important factor in, at 
> least, fantasy. The more sedate, linear, SciFi you (or Gould) identify 
> as changing 1 thing and iterating the consequences does seem focused 
> on consistency. But I'm reminded of Deutsch's "hard to vary" criterion 
> for a good scientific theory. The impetus there is an upper bound to 
> Twitch, I think. How big can we puff up the cone of possibilities so 
> that it covers the most interesting "adjacent possible"? Or, perhaps 
> the question would be what types of metrics can we define such that 
> "adjacent" is maximized? A radius of 1 in some metrics may be larger 
> than a radius of 1 in other metrics. And Twitch is the generative 
> impulse, the (pseudo)RNG that takes us from here to there. Coverage is 
> more important than consistency in fantasy.
>
> On 2/4/22 07:44, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I like the refinement you are gesturing at here, if I'm following.  I 
>> think that is what Zelazny did with his Amber stuff and the ideation 
>> of this whole (infinite?) milieu of  parallel worlds being held in 
>> the tension of Logos and Chaos.
>>
>> I haven't read any of this work in decades so I expect my 
>> understanding of all that would be different today, but at the time I 
>> think I held that as the spectrum/gradient of entropy between the 
>> low-information of perfect order and low information of random order 
>> with "the interesting stuff" happening somewhere in between.   The 
>> specific quantization of coherent "worlds" that individuals can 
>> participate in more or less in the way *we* experience our world (or 
>> think we do?) is fascinating to me. There is a variant of the 
>> anthropic principle at-work here perhaps?
>>
>> What you say about alternate logics is more obvious in it's coherent 
>> quantization...   and the world of whack-a-doodle "alternative facts" 
>> is obviously seductive to those who indulge in it, but the 
>> requirement of internal consistency seems to be what yields 
>> quantization or at least concentrations of clusters of factoids (like 
>> virtual particles?)?
>>
>>
>> On 2/4/22 8:03 AM, glen wrote:
>>> I think one of the reasons I *want* to believe in parallel worlds 
>>> and a fully embellished conception of counterfactuals is *because* 
>>> of my preference for stories with such variation in what can be 
>>> tweaked and then iterated forward to watch the consequences. It's 
>>> also why I'm gobsmacked by alternative logics, despite my 
>>> incompetence therein. What we call "absurd" almost never really 
>>> feels absurd to me. It's fine! Just play along.
>>>
>>> On 2/3/22 13:15, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>> Stephen C Gould, the difference between SF and Fantasy is that in 
>>>> SF, one singular known fact is changed (faster than light travel, 
>>>> time travel, wormhole, infinite cheap energy, etc.) and everything 
>>>> else ensues from that, while in Fantasy, *everything* is up for 
>>>> grabs (e.g. Magic) and everything ensues from that!
>>>>
>>>> Zelazny's Amber-schtick seems to follow *somewhat* from that 
>>>> idea... in some sense, it seems as if everything Magical he invoked 
>>>> was somehow a natural consequence of the schmear of physical laws 
>>>> across the schmear of parallel worlds suspended between the 
>>>> antipodes of Logos and Chaos (my interpretation of his deal)...
>>>
>
>
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